Saturday, September 29, 2007

Denny, my Father-in-Law, has Alzheimer's.He's still with us, and I already miss him.Denny has always been a pack rat. In addition to being an ROTC instructor, he taught furniture refinishing at New Mexico State. His students probably were given projects from his overflowing garage. He always had an eye for other people's discards. Most of the furniture in his home was found on the side of the road, taken home, re-worked, re-finished, and now looks great. One of the saddest aspects of the Alzheimer's has been the loss of the muscle memory required to do that type work.There are three buildings behind my In-Law's house - one was a workshop, one was a storage shed for the lawnmower and yard tools, and one was the original servant's quarters from the era when their home was built in the 1920's. My In-Law's will have to move to an Assisted Living facility some time in the next year. Denny can no longer maintain the place.Denny would never allow us to clear the accumulated junk from the three outbuildings. He honest-to-God planned to eventually use ALL of it. So we've had to empty the buildings while he's out of town. When he returns, he may or may not notice that his hoardings are gone. But we'll tell him he helped us, he'll eventually remember helping us, and all will be well.Two of my drivers from work, Adrian and RJ, helped us haul the stuff to the dumpster(s). The first building was so full that you couldn't walk through the door. There was lumber. There were railroad ties. Sections of chain link fence. He had 10 ice chest/drink boxes in there; four had been mis-appropriated from his last job at Meals on Wheels. Two were from his church. Four others had been AWOL for years. It's hard to remember to return something when you can't remember taking it.Two of the drink boxes were filled with leaves, one was filled with dirt. One was so heavy we almost couldn't budge it. (Nuts, bolts, lockwashers, nails) The others were filled with STUFF. 1981 Texas Ranger Ballcaps. Screwdrivers. Rope. Stool legs. One drink box contained an assortment of 5-gallon ziplock bags filled with roots.That's just the ice chest category. We maxed out a 24-foot box truck, just from the two outbuildings that we emptied today. We hauled off a Mexican birthing stool, four ladders, three wheelbarrows with no tires, two broken lawnmowers, tree limbs (?) and enough venetian blinds to black every out every window in The House of Seven Gables.The deeper we went into the first building, the more "logical" the contents became. Buried in each building was an assortment of semi-useful lumber, yard tools, and other things of value that had been stored there during the good times. I didn't want any of it, but someone might. Halfway to the door were things from the era where the disease took over. That's where we found leaking garden hoses, mis-matched floor tile, and the beginnings of his rock collection (the rock collection will probably be a future post). No one would ever want this stuff, or go to any effort to keep it out of the rain.The area nearest the door, implying that it's contents had been stored within the last two years, had all the truly useless stuff. Broken axe handles. Tree limbs. Screenless screen doors. Stumps. Each building was a perfect metaphor for a mind dealing with Alzheimer's. The new stuff was a useless muddle that couldn't even qualify as garbage. The older material still made sense.I gave Adrian and RJ first crack at owning any of it, just for taking it home.Denny has spent the last two years carefully packing this stuff away.Adrian took a few trinkets, and RJ politely declined.I almost cried.

If you didn't have the social, cultural, and career advantages of growing up Southern Baptist, you might not catch the "Whited Sepulchre" reference....It's from a story told about Jesus, when he compared his accusers to "Whited Sepulchres" or Freshly Painted Tombs.

These tombs were beautiful on the outside, and full of rotteness and corruption on the inside. After accidentally touching a Sepulchre, or tomb, any devout believer who subscribed to the complete rigamarole of the clean/unclean belief system had to go through a long and tiresome cleansing process.

This purification and cleansing process could kill several weekends.

Therefore, tombs were routinely painted Day-Glo white so anyone who happened to be going through the graveyard at night could avoid accidental contamination in the dark.

This left weekends free for avoiding pork, studying the Torah, and throwing rocks at adulterous women until they bled to death.

If I routinely post updates on this site, I suspect I'll focus on various Whited Sepulchres that make me nuts. Lots of things make me nuts. I make me nuts. So does the government. Religious nut cases. Drive-through windows. Department of Transportation requirements. And perhaps I'll include some other musings on travels, extended family, and whether or not it's sane to own four weiner dogs.

John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.Every playwright's dream.I once won one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" in New York magazine. The task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was the World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.My prize, in a stunning example of irony, was a year's subscription to New York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann's "Competition") I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.But I digress.I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with.Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace."Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.At the same time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt, venal, cunning, and vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two turkeys. And I gave this fictional president a speechwriter who, in his view, is a "brain-dead liberal," much like my earlier self; and in the course of the play, they have to work it out. And they eventually do come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I am trying to do, and in which I believe I may be succeeding, and I will try to summarize it in the words of William Allen White.White was for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I've ever read about the presidency. It's called Masks in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it unreservedly.White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he'd seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: " . . . and yet . . . "The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.